Neighborhood children dance, play and create art at annual Sculpt EVV event

JESSIE HIGGINS / Courier & Press
Joshua McIntosh, 16, creates sidewalk chalk art at Saturday afternoon’s Sculpt EVV Community Art and Music Festival in Evansville on Saturday. The event featured many games, activities and performances for children and adults.

JESSIE HIGGINS / Courier & Press
Buggy Miles, 5, pretends to play a game of chess with her neighborhood friends at the third annual Sculpt EVV Community Art and Music Festival in Evansville on Saturday. She and her friends didn’t know how to play the game, but that didn’t stop them from sitting there off and on all afternoon.

JESSIE HIGGINS / Courier & Press
As the Boom Squad, Inc. perform at University of Southern Indiana’s third annual Sculpt EVV Community Art and Music Festival, 18-month-old Izzabelle Majors dances and sways to the rhythm. Her mother, Amanda Miller, takes a video of the little girl as she dances on Saturday in Evansville.

The third annual Sculpt EVV Community Art and Music Festival lit up the Haynie's Corner Arts District on Saturday afternoon.

As adults listened to live R&B Music and perused vendor stalls, children ran about building sculptures, playing chess, learning to play drums and more.

"This year we changed the format, tried to offer people choices," said Hilary Braysmith, a University of Southern Indiana art history professor and the Sculpt EVV project director. "We went with Gospel and R&B, and it was jazzy R&B. And we brought in more activities for the kids."

Unlike last year's event, which was a national outdoor sculpture competition, this year the group had only one sculpture and a mural on display. The rest of the event was more focused on interactive activities and performances. Early in the afternoon, USI alumnus Mark Brendel and other USI students helped neighborhood children build a sculpture of recycled materials that would both serve as a chess board and hummingbird pollinator.

The event also featured a pop-up display where artists taught neighborhood children how to speak about the artwork. After that, USI students hosted a community drum lesson followed by a performance by the Boom Squad, Inc.

"I was trying to think of good art space metaphors for the community," Braysmith said. Evansville's Boom Squad, Inc. performs and communicates with drums in the same way other African or Native American communities have for centuries, she said.

"So maybe we could take some kids, which we did, and give them their first drum lesson, so they could speak too."

Many dozens of people came out for the event, some lived in the surrounding neighborhood others did not.

USI will host a second Sculpt EVV event — "Sculpt EVV Part Two" — Friday at Haynie's Corner, when they will unveil an unoccupied home that art students will have transformed into an "immersive art experience."